" WeAre WhatWe Eat

Ethnic Foodand the Making of Americans

Donna R. Gabaccia .

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Mangiando, ricordo: All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Dedicated to Tamino, Second printing, 2000 Illustrations by Susan Keller my German,speaking, ltalo,Polish,American child, Libraryof CongressCataloging-in- PublicationData who eats Ethiopian and cooks Cuban Gabaccia, Donna R., 1949- We are what we eat : ethnic food and the making of Americans I and who grew up with this book Donna R. Gabaccia. , p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-94860-2 1. Food habits-United States. 2. Ethnic food industry-United States. 3. Ethnic attitudes-United States. 4. United States­ Social life and customs. I. Tide. GT2853.U5G33 1998 394.1'2'0973-dc21 97-52712 Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 65

bananas, from the very same stores. The businessmen of enclave commu­ nities soon brought the products of mass manufacturers in far-off locations to Locke and to the Lower East Side. Eventually, too, they would deliver foods of Chinese and Jewish eaters to consumers of other cultural back­ grounds. The relationship of enclave businessmen and ethnic consumers was usually a close one, and it supported a culture of business quite unlike that of America's growing corporations. But conflict abounded. Ethnic enclave businesses competed intensely among themselves, as driven by profit mo­ tives as any other businesses in the United States and as vulnerable to the fickleness of their customers. Enclave consumers provided a rather fragile Ethnic Entrepreneurs financial foundation for ethnic businessmen, who, like many other Ameri­ cans, desired security and upward mobility. The unpredictability inherent in enclave markets repeatedly encouraged small businesses to look farther afield, beyond the boundaries of ethnic communities, for a wider market of In 1915 the small Chinese community in Locke, California, supported 6 more diverse consumers. restaurants, 9 grocery stores (two with their own slaughterhouses), a flour mill, and numerous boarding houses-all run by Chinese businessmen selling to Chinese consumers.' In 1899 the much larger Jewish Lower East Few saw this fragility in 1900. Lacking cosmopolitan palates, American Side in New York City boasted 140 groceries, 131 kosher butchers, 36 consumers at the tum of the century bought much of their food from bakeries, 9 bread stands, 14 butter and egg stores, 24 candy stores, 7 coffee entrepreneurs "of their own kind." Ethnic and regional food cultures cre­ shops, 10 delicatessens, 9 fish stores, 7 fruit stands, 2 meat markets, 10 ated quasi-monopoly markets for cultural insiders. In these markets, busi­ sausage stores, 20 soda water stands, 5 tea shops, 11 vegetable stores, 13 nessmen needed a secure and loyal clientele more than large amounts of wine shops, 15 grape wine shops, and 10 confectioners. Here, too, Jewish capital. While it was hard to succeed for long in the business of food businesses produced and sold to Jewish customers.2 Descriptions like these purveyor, it was not at all difficult to get started. Thousands of humble suggest how important consumption was becoming, even among cultural immigrant and minority entrepreneurs did so. conservatives like new immigrants and the rural eaters of the South and At the beginning of the chain were immigrant farmers. Often, they had Southwest. The desire for the familiar provided the foundation for busi­ introduced crops new to the United States in order to eat, and to sell, nesses in these enclaves, and those businesses in tum made culinary con­ foods familiar in far-off homelands. When Elise Waerenskold arrived in servatism possible. Women like Mary Antin's mother turned to them in Texas in the 1850s, for example, she reported unhappily that she had been large numbers for the familiar ingredients which enclave businessmen, not unable to buy seed for "any kind of cabbage or cauliflower, kohlrabi, Swed­ distant corporations, best understood. ish turnips, or French turnips (botfeldtske)." She advised prospective Nor­ As impressive, extensive, and complete as these lists of ethnic busi­ wegian immigrants to bring seeds with them. In a later letter she asked a nesses seem, their self-sufficiency and economic isolation nevertheless friend to send fruit pits, and in 1870 she instructed another to bring trees proved transitory. Already in 1890, Antin's father had probably bought the along for her. She requested empress, bergamot, and gray pear trees; glass "little tins that had printing all over them," as well as the queer, slippery and pigeon apple trees; green and St. Catherine's plum trees; and cherry 66 • We Are What We Eat Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 67 trees. She promised to pay for the transportation of Norwegian gooseberry In California alone, Chinese immigrants created a market for almost 35 and currant bushes. By then, Warenskold was already successfully raising million pounds of imported rice: 3 2 million pounds came from China, the cabbage and cauliflower absent in her early days in Texas) the remainder from Hawaii. As late as 1932, Japanese in Hawaii still pur­ Agricultural innovation by immigrant eaters was even more pro­ chased 158,800 pounds of umeboshi (red-pickled plums) valued at $5,460 nounced in the West, which by the end of the nineteenth century had and 98,623 pounds of fu (gluten cakes) for $17,259 .71talians in California become the center of American agriculture. In Hawaii, Chinese rice grow­ created a strong market for Mediterranean products: in 1879 the state ers imported familiar fish varieties from Asia in order to stock local streams imported 4 million gallons of wine; 140,000 cases of sparkling wine; and irrigation ditches. One farmer-Look Sing-introduced an Asian 500,000 gallons of brandy; 1,500 tons of figs; and 300,000 gallons of olive shellfish that was popularly used in important festival dishes in China and oil.8 By 1930, importers of green chile from Mexico included the Arthur was not available in the New World. In California, Japanese farmers intro­ Commission Company in Milwaukee; Albuquerque's Mercantile Com­ duced Napa cabbage and the radishes of their homeland. Felix Gillet pany; the Gebhart Chili Powder Company in San Antonio; the Ruther­ introduced soft-shelled walnuts, and Louis Pellier imported prune plum ford Chile Company in Kansas City; La Mexicana in San Francisco; cuttings, both from their native France. Italians in the Santa Clara valley McCormicks' Spice Company in Baltimore; and Jose La Llomera of continued to cultivate prickly pears (popular with Sicilians) until the NewYork.9 1940s; Sal LoBue believed his grandfather had first introduced them. Not Not surprisingly, this sector of American food trade was dominated by far from LoBue's farm, Santo Ortolano claimed to have introduced broc­ ethnic businessmen, who best knew consumer tastes and the place to coli, an Italian favorite, in 1902. "No one liked broccoli for a long time," purchase the desired products. As early as the 1880s, Chinese importers in Ortolano noted. Ortolano also grew the long, giant squashes known in San Francisco organized a Chinese Chamber of Commerce to keep abreast Sicily as "guguzz"; these were candied by immigrants for incorporation in of customs and tariff regulations affecting their trade; they incorporated in festival pastries.4 1909. During the same years, grocers and wholesale groceries operated by Everywhere, too, immigrant farmers sold surpluses of these culinary Germans and other Central Europeans dominated food importing from oddities, thus becoming truck gardeners for their urban countrymen. Ital­ Europe.10 The 27 importers listed in the 1906 San Francisco Directory ians in the Greenbush section of Madison remembered ordering tomatoes reflected the range of the town's eating communities by that time: Ger­ from two old Sicilian truck farmers, who "delivered to our backyard, usu­ man, German Jewish, Italian, French, Japanese, and Slavic importers out­ ally in quantities of five to ten bushels every day."5 More often, truck numbered those with English-origin or ethnically unclear surnames. farmers organized urban markets to sell their wares. Mexican farmers near Even relatively small grocers often used personal connections to import San Antonio set up their market in the Military Plaza, where a visitor in and then sell small quantities of local homeland specialties. These ven­ 1897 described how "the green of the big stacks of watermelons foils the tures did not always work out for the best. In Brooklyn, one small-scale yellow of carrots, and is shaded off by the paler green of the cabbage importer and grocer accidentally split open a barrel of olive oil during its mountains ... The dull red and clear white onions, the pink radishes, pale transport from basement storage to the family's flat; his daughter recalled cantaloupes, carmine tomatoes and brown potatoes."6 In Denver, Italian seeing "a great oil river ... run down the stairs and spread in a vast oily truck farmers peddled their produce door to door, while in San Francisco, smear across the linoleum of the lower floor." This unfortunate incident Italian commission agents organized Colombo Market in 1874 to connect quickly terminated the family import business. 11 the many Italian farmers and consumers of this growing city. San Francisco's Domingo Ghirardelli had better luck. He began life in a What could not be grown locally could be imported-albeit at a price. Genovese family of pastry makers and spice importers, and first practiced Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 69 his importing and candy-manufacturing skills in Peru. Around the middle import plum tomato seeds. Together they began raising and eventually of the nineteenth century, after moving to San Francisco, Ghirardelli canning this popular variety of tomatoes in California, shipping to eastern continued to import spkes, while beginning to grind spices and chocolate consumers. In Hawaii, large numbers of Japanese and Chinese immigrants in a local factory. Ghirardelli's sons then made the family's cocoa and encouraged local production of Asian staples like rice, tofu, miso, and koji. chocolate products popular in San Francisco and beyond.12 Indeed, Hawaii soon grew so much rice that it exported it, temporarily, to Even the humblest of urban immigrants could parlay production for the mainland. family consumption into small businesses, often organized and initially run The Second World War, like the first, provoked a crisis for immigrants from a hard-working woman's kitchen. Over time, these small producers accustomed to importing key food items and for the ethnic businessmen provided domestic alternatives to imports. In New York and other cities, who handled the trade. In San Francisco in the 1930s, C. Granucci and Italian immigrants' taste for pasta and flavored ice desserts turned hun­ Sons had imported Italian cheeses; Italian and French dried mushrooms; dreds of homes and grocery stores into small-time factories. Visitors to tomato paste; Norwegian, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese sar­ New York's Little ltalies at the tum of the century found macaroni under dines and other canned fish; and their own Granucci brand olive oil from production on every block-sometimes in cellar bakeries, sometimes in Lucca, in Tuscany.I4 But after World War II broke out, Italians had homes, sometimes in shop stores attached to tenement apartments. Pasta to switch to California olive oil-which they found "only fair"-and to was hung up to dry on frames in windows, cellars, and tenement roofs. Spanish olive oil. When the price of imported parmigiana cheese soared Until World War I most Italians made their pasta, whether for home from 80 cents to $1.60 a pound, putting it beyond the reach of ordinary consumption or sale, from imported Russian durum wheat. After World eaters, consumers began to accept comparable cheeses manufactured in War I, when it was temporarily unavailable, they turned to American Argentina and Wisconsin. IS durum wheat flour; this change finally sparked a few investors in large­ Kosher eaters could not easily depend on imports, so the arrival of scale manufacturing of pasta. Eastern European Jews led to the rapid growth of a variety of food indus­ The La Rosa Company, founded in 1914 by a Sicilian who had imported tries in America. Kosher butchering attracted particular attention. During olive oil from his native Sicily beginning in 1907, expanded only after the first decades of the twentieth century there were more than 10,000 World War I. By 1930 the company had 300 {Italian) workers and sales of kosher butcher shops in the United States, as many as 9,000 in New York $3-5 million a year. Still, as late as 1937, a WPA investigator declared the alone. By 1917, at the height of Orthodoxy in America, a million Jews macaroni industry "more or less at the stage of transition from home ate 156 million pounds of kosher meat each year. 16 Because the rules of industry to the modem factories of mass production"; he found 8 major kashruth required meat to be soaked and salted (to remove blood) within plants operating in Brooklyn and Queens, among them La Rosa and Ron­ 72 hours of an animal's slaughter, kosher meat generally sold for four or five zoni.l3 The transition from small-scale domestic to factory production took cents more per pound than other beef. (And if prices increased, Jewish even longer for Italian ices, beginning in 1930 with New York's Marchioni women took to the streets, boycotting and even destroying shops that sold Spumoni Company. meat at inflated prices.) With high prices as an incentive, meat packers in Local farmers and domestic producers sometimes competed directly Chicago, though far away from the center ofJewish life in New York City, with importers of foreign goods; in other cases, however, importers them­ attempted to provide kosher meat, hiring a Jewish "shochet" (butcher) and selves provided the capital for mass cultivation of a desired product. In the shipping the koshered meat back East via refrigerated train cars. But Jew­ 1930s a Brooklyn Jewish woman who had noted the popularity of imported ish consumers remained skeptical. A 1925 New York State study claimed plum tomatoes with her Italian customers found an Italian partner to that 40 percent of the meat sold as kosher in the city was actually ritually unclean. And as late as 1929 one, third of New York's beef was still slitugh­ tered locally for Jewish customers so concerned with purity that only local chased from sizeable sausage factories, like the Hebrew National Kosher meat could serve. Sausage Factory and the Williamsburg Genuine Kosher Meat Products Efforts to satisfy Orthodox consumers' concerns and certify meat as Company in New York. Kosher butchers also offered sausages they called kosher even if it traveled long distances recurred periodically. In 1887 kosher "hot dogs," modeled on the German sausages that were marketed at American fairs and sporting events, following their introduction at the St. eighteen Orth<'ldox synagogues in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore united and called for Jacob Joseph, the chief rabbi ofVilna, to come serve Louis world's fair in 1904. Disagreements quickly arose over who produced the best of this kosher New York specialty. Was it Nathan's? Was it H~­ as their head. Among his duties, he was to organize the kosher meat business. Lacking financial backing and facing opposition from beef and brew National? Lee Silver of New York insisted that the true Hot Dog poultry butchers and from other rabbis, Joseph's efforts foundered. In 1909 King was Abe Gellis of Isaac Gellis Delicatessen. Gellis, defending the superiority of his kosher hot dog, which he made in his own delicatessen, the Kehillah (community association) of New York attempted again, with­ out much success, to unite all branches of Judaism around a program complained that "Hebrew National uses hydrolyzed plant protein, which is an additive, and to me that's not kosher." 18 of certification. In 1923 the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations started an official kashruth supervision and certification program, but lim­ In the Southwest, a burgeoning population of Mexican immigrants cre· ited its attention to processed foods, thus avoiding clashes with the large ated demand for their own culturally unique products. In San Antonio, numbers of rabbis already engaged in certifying the city's many butchers. Bartolo Martinez opened a mill in 1896, believed to be the first masa mill Encouraged by mayors Walker and La Guardia in the 1930s, the Kashruth in the country. His Molino Para Nixtamal company prepared dough for Association focused on certifying the kosher poultry market, but the purity tortillas; Martinez then delivered the mixture about town in a wagon. By of meat remained a matter of uncertainty for Orthodox consumers, even the 1920s Francisco Garcia, a Basque immigrant who came to San Anto· after New York State passed a Kosher Law enforced by a Bureau of Kosher nio via Mexico, had opened San Antonio's first tortilla factory, competing Law in its Department of Agriculture in 1934.17 with many other smaller producers and with housewives working in their own kitchens. Just as important to Orthodox Jews was the purity of Passover matzos, and their production, too, became big business quite quickly. For example Farther west in California in the last years of the nineteenth century, a a baker from Hungary, Jacob Horowitz, founded Horowitz Brothers and young and struggling wine industry revived with the arrival of millions of Magareten Company in 1883; his Hungarian-born countrymen had asked new immigrant wine drinkers to eastern cities. Whatever the popularity of him to produce Passover matzos, since they did not trust non-Hungarian wine in Charleston in the colonial era, the United States had not be­ bakers to do it properly. Horowitz and Magareten soon faced competi­ come a nation of wine drinkers, and efforts to produce a palatable wine tion in the sale of Passover matzos from Ruach and Strumpf and other from local grapes repeatedly foundered as they had in the colonial era. bakers. Meanwhile, Goodman and Son, Gottfried and Steckler, and In the 1840s Elise Waerenskold's Norwegian neighbors in Texas success­ Nathan Messing began to specialize in producing other baked goods-ba­ fully brewed mead and beer at home, but she lamented that she "had not 19 gels, challah, cookies, and strudels-in forms and tastes familiar to the tasted a glass of wine" in four years. Wherever immigrant wine drinkers Jews of Eastern Europe. settled-Germans in Cincinnati, Missouri, and California in the 1850s, Jews from that region had also long eaten kosher sausages, which could and Italians in New York after 1880---commercial efforts to produce wine not be imported under U.S. import laws in the twentieth century. While followed, often undertaken by immigrant farmers and vintners. Still, it delicatessen owners sometimes produced their own, most eventually pur- took almost one hundred years to produce a palatable American wine. The problem was not lack of expertise about the making of wine-immigrants 72 • We Are What We Eat Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 73 had brought that with them since colonial ·days. As one historian of million; in 1870, 28 million. The 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposi­ American wine explained, "The problem [was] to find a grape that would, tion gave good advertising to California wines, whose acceptance by the first of all, survive, and second, yield a juice worth converting into wine."20 public was aided by the collapse of French and Italian wine exports owing Until the 1960s, those few natives who cared about wine generally drank to phylloxera devastation.ZZ expensive imports. A British observer claimed that "the others ('winos' After 1860 the founders of northern and southern California vine­ apart ... ) drank hard liquor, or Coke, or beer by the can, unless they were yards producing for eastern immigrant consumers were almost all foreign­ first-generation Americans or recent immigrants of Italian or ... Mediter­ ers: the French Pierre Pellier and Pierre Mirassou in San Jose; Etienne ranean stock."21 Immigrants provided the necessary consumers to spark Thee and Charles Lefranc (founders of Almaden) at Los Gatos; the Ger­ new investment in California vineyards. man Carl Wente and the Irishman James Concannon in Livermore Valley; Before 1860, California wine-making flourished on a small scale around the German Charles Krug and the Finnish Gustav Niebaum (founder of the sites of the former Spanish Missions in the south, especially around Los Inglenook) in Napa; the Italian-Swiss Agricultural Colony in Cloverdale. Angeles. Two San Fnmcisco musicians and wine importers, the Germans After 1880 Italians began to buy older vineyards from these pioneers and Charles Kohler and John Frohling, began a trend, however, when they to start new ones. purchased a northern vineyard in order to produce wine for their wine California vineyards soon specialized in producing either red wines, shop and importing business. With California's incorporation into the called Chianti by their Italian vintners and "dago red" by their consumers, United States, the development of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, or sweet white dessert wines, some of them carbonated. They sold these and the arrival of millions of wine-drinking Germans and Italians, growers blended, bulk wines in barrels to wholesale grocers and importers in New in California's northern counties extended grape production and tried York and other eastern cities. The years before 1900 saw recurring boom new wine-making techniques. Strong demand provided a strong incentive: and bust, and intensive competition. In an effort to regulate competition 7,000 Italians in Trenton, New Jersey, alone supported 51 sellers of wines and to market their wines more effectively, two groups of grape grow~ and liquors. formed marketing cooperatives in the 1890s: a multi-ethnic group of Before the 1860s, family-based vineyards and wine-making prevailed, mainly second-generation Americans (the sons of German and other Cen­ and East Coast wine markets were controlled by Ohio and New York tral European wine makers) founded the California Wine Association in producers. In the 1850s Kohler began efforts to market his wines in the 1894; it competed with the California Wine Makers' Corporation com­ East. Large-scale production of European rather than mission grapes was posed largely of Italian growers. With 60,000 people employed in the then introduced by the Hungarian revolutionary count Agoston industry in 1910, and a yearly production of 50 million gallons of wine, 23 Haraszthy, who imported over 100,000 cuttings of European vines in the production for eastern immigrant markets had become very big business. 1860s. Haraszthy hoped to get state support to create a 6,000-acre vine­ yard, with marketing offices in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Phila­ delphia, and London. Failing to get legislative support for his enterprise, Closer than producers to conservative enclave consumers, and far more he purchased Buena Vista vineyards with private backing but quickly be­ numerous, were local immigrant retailers. Among these, the humblest gan randomly selling his European vines to pay off his debts. Lands de­ were pushcart street vendors. One Italian immigrant son believed that voted to grapes expanded after the introduction of these new vines, but purchasing from the street itself distinguished immigrants from native­ the origins of the root stocks were often lost in the process, discouraging born Americans, since "we had a bread man ... and a fruit and vegetable European vintners from experimenting with Old World techniques like man, a watermelon man and a fish man ... Americans went to the stores vintaging. In 1855 there were 1 million vines in California; in 1860, 8 for most of their food-what a waste."24 In New York, immigrant vendors 74 • We Are What We Eat Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 75

pioneered in decentralizing market sites, bringing foods to consumers and creaky boats entered the harbor like a swarm of mosquitoes, giving them relocating sales in residential neighborhoods, usually in the form of im­ their name-the mosquito fleet. promptu pushcart markets set up adjacent to Jewish, Italian, and, later, Natives and visitors alike noted the haunting calls with which black Spanish tenement buildings. While most of the immigrant pushcart trad­ street vendors announced their wares in the marketplace. Joe Cole had a ers were men, in the Jewish community women too joined the crowded small shop, called Joe Cole and Wife, but he walked the streets with a markets along Hester and Broome Streets. One, Annie Jacobs of the Blake limp, yelling Street Market in Brooklyn, refused her grown-up children's offer to pay her twenty-five dollars to stay home. "While I've got my health, I'll earn my Old Joe Cole-Good Old Soul own living."25 Porgy in the Summer-time and Whiting in the Spring In a city like New York, where huge public markets like Fulton received 8 upon a string. 50 million tons of fish each year, and where six billion pounds of fruit Don't be late, I'm sattin' [sitting] at de gate arrived to be processed and sold annually, immigrant pushcart operators Don't be mad-Here's your shad speeded the path from producer to final consumer. To established, native­ Old Joe Cole-Good Old Soul. born Americans, these peddlers symbolized the chaos and dangers of the food marketplace (Was the food tainted? old? rotten?) but also the ambi­ The same writer described hucksters who called themselves "vegetubbl~ tion and verve of "penny capitalists." What could seem more "American" Maumas"; she described them as "wonderful, wide-chested, big-hipped than a hard-working, striving immigrant small businessman? Pushcart ven­ specimens of womanhood that balance a fifty pound basket of vegetabW dors helped make the prices for groceries lower on the Lower East Side on their heads and ever and anon cry their goods," including one. eo than anywhere else in New York, or indeed in the nation. A sympathetic called out her yams as "Swete Pete Ate Her."28 , 1 historian even termed the pushcarts "social democracy in the market­ place."26 A short step above the street huckster in the hierarchy of en:cruwa retailers, and even more ubiquitous in American cities, was the snudl One did not have to be foreign-born, however, to understand the effec­ grocer serving an ethnic clientele. Mary Antin's father made this cn'ieial tiveness of marketing to consumer housewives in their homes. In the transition: he began by selling cold lemonade, hot peanuts, and pink pop.; southern city of Charleston, slaves had dominated huckstering as they had corn at a beach-side stand, and then graduated to a small store in a Jewish hunting, gathering, and gardening in the years before the Civil War. After neighborhood.29Thousands of men and women followed the same path. In freedom, African-American hucksters, selling watermelons, seed cakes, New York in 1938, almost 10,000 groceries still catered excluSively

Schoch's expanded to a $2 million business by the 1920s. Besides the retail ploy--credit. In doing so, of course, he also attracted the poorest consuni~ grocery, which had been its first department, it operated a large wholesale ers, increasing the risk of his business operations. When clients lost woda:, department selling to hotels, restaurants, and dining cars of railroads; it or when unemployment soared, or when quarrels and disagreements shat; . ' • roasted its own coffee, baked its own bread, and ran its own meat market. tered friendly community relations, grocers lost their stores. A Bulgariart

Other successful grocers like New York's Jewish Krasne family and Bos­ woman described how she and her husband lost their business after OX<'! ton's Armenian Mugar family (founders of Star Markets) started out with tending credit to fellow countrymen, who then deserted them during the small chains of groceries serving their ethnic communities. Immigrant Great Depression, leaving them with no cash to purchase goods. The wholesalers and commission agents linked them to far-off corporate pro­ woman was bitter about how clients treated her after she had extended ducers. In New York, produce agents bought from the city's large auctions them credit: "I went around to collect some money and people would that brought fruit and vegetables from all over the East Coast and from pretend they didn't know me and would close their doors." The truly bitter California. These agents were as divided by ethnicity as the eating com­ end was that she and her husband were forced back into the mill jobs they munities they provisioned. While three (presumably Jewish) commission had temporarily escaped.35 Mary Antin's father, too, was either unlucky or agents-Breslauer & Fliegler, Nathan Lieblich, and Sam Berger--dealt incompetent enough that all his businesses failed. When Mary became only in fruits and vegetables, Italian dealers listed specialties with great sick, the family found itself in debt to another grocer, just as families had precision. Angelo Fruit Distributors at Washington Market handled toma­ once been in debt to them. toes, apples, string beans, berries, and peppers, while Tony Annunziato Mary Antin nevertheless reached positive conclusions about the fraught (who worked out of the Bronx Terminal Market) sold grapes and apples. A relationship between humble ethnic grocer and humble ethnic consumer. few Jewish commission agents' listings hinted at the preferences of their "The poor grocer helped to keep me in school for I do not know how many eating communities. Kornblum and Company on Warren Street listed years."36 Another immigrant noted, "We had an angel of a man whose 78 • We Are What We Eat Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 79

name was Herman He would trust most of the neighbors. He had a ... explained, "You can depend on the beer, but you can't tell about the milk little mahogany-colored book, and he would put down all the things he you get down here."43 would trust you with, expecting to be paid either Friday night or Saturday 37 In cities throughout the United States, ethnocentric bars catered moming." Even in enclave businesses, however, caveat emptor reigned. exclusively to one group of consumers.44 Swedish saloons served Swedish The daughter of a German farmer remembered her father staying up all punch and provided meeting rooms for labor unions and singing societies. night to check the figures in their "store book." His effort paid off, when he For Italians, the saloon was a gathering place for men during the long found that the grocer, as he suspected, had overcharged him a few dollars.3 8 idle periods between construction seasons; padroni might recruit workers Thus, consumers, too, had mixed feelings about credit. But those who there. Polish bars provided a place for dancing. needed it avoided chain stores (which operated on a cash-only basis) well into the 1920s and 1930s. In San Antonio, the German community's Alamo Street saloons were more civilized than most. Writing about "Glamourous Days in San Anto­ Given the close ties between ethnic retailers and their clientele, it is nio," Frank Bushick insisted, "There were no six-shooter brawls or glass scarcely surprising that food businesses functioned as informal community throwing, no vulgarity or vice, in the German saloons of this type."45 centers. Serving drinks transformed any business into a center of commu­ Germans found "American" (by which they often meant Irish) bars and nity life. In San Francisco, German and Irish grocers installed small tables their drinking customs both peculiar and unhealthy. Speaking of an where drinks could be dispensed, and a school boy writing on temperance American bar in New York, one German observed, "The saloonkeeper at school protested, "If it wasn't for our pap's selling beer and whiskey stands behind the counter, like in the shops in Germany," and the men along with OTHER GROCERIES, quite a number of us boys couldn't there drink "everything standing up, all in one gulp, you can imagine how dress as well as we do."39Beyond the grocery, Germans had their "lokale" that hits the head." Germans preferred to drink slowly and leisurely in and their saloons, where beer was the main beverage; Irish and British groups seated in a cheerful or "gemiitlich" (comfortable, intimate, home­ immigrants had their bars and public rooms for consuming ale and whis­ like) atmosphere.46 Another German complained of American drinking, key; Italians had cafes for drinking beer, wine, and coffee; Greeks had their "You can't stand around, you get neither a bench nor chair, just drink your Kafenion (coffee shops); Jews enjoyed their tea rooms. Ethnic drinking schnapps and then go."47 Germans equally disapproved of the Yankee habits showed visibly on urban streets. In New York, one investigator for habit of treating, which put pressure on slow drinkers; they preferred The York Times found only 321 saloons on 170 Jewish blocks on the New "Dutch treat," with each paying for his own drink. The German lokal and Lower East Side but 256 saloons on 70 Italian blocks just west of the Bowery.40 beer garden were extensions of home, where, according to New Yorker Junius Browne, wives, children, and sweethearts "are a check to any ex­ Particularly among Germans, beer drinking and social life went hand in cesses or impropriety, and with whom they depart at a seemly hour, hand. Beer was an essential food for Germans and several other northern overflowing with beer and bonhomie, possessed of those two indis­ European immigrant groups. Bohemians on the Great Plains and Norwe­ pensables of peace-an easy mind and a perfect digestion."48 The presence gians in Texas brewed at home, and a Swiss migrant in Minnesota wrote of German women and children in drinking establishments, even on Sun­ home, "So little by little, we expect to become . . . well off . . . with days, shocked American Protestants and prohibitionists, however. our own wine, sugar, coffee (made from wheat!), beer [and] fruits of all Immigrant neighborhoods often had more bars, tea rooms, or coffee kinds."4I Children in these groups began drinking early; a German woman shops than they could sensibly support, so for these businessmen, too, from New York's Yorkville German neighborhood recalled, "I drank beer competition was intense and business risk high. Saloons in particular were from little up. Anything my father had at the table for supper, we could practically on every comer. The small mining town of Hibbings, Minne­ have. He always had his beer, so we all had our little glass."42A Chicagoan sota, housed 70 saloons in the early twentieth century.49 Beginning in the 80 • We Are What We Eat Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 81

1880s, when brewers financed 70 percent of them, opening a saloon be­ Scandinavian." Twenty-five years later there were 130, with German, Pol­ came very inexpensive. One Chicago barkeeper remembered, "All you ish, and Scandinavian names, owners, and residents. need, you might say, is the key to the place, and you can get that by paying Competing with boarding houses to feed unattached men were small 50 the first month's rent." Tied to their community, barkeepers, like grocers, restaurants, which also sometimes evolved from grocer, delicatessen, or extended credit. The Irish butcher and meat packer Patrick Cudahy saw boarding family businesses. New York claimed roughly 10,000 Italian res­ men throwing stone dust on themselves so they could appear to be em­ taurants in the 1930s, and according to a survey, "Every district, city and ployed stone cutters and could go into the stone cutters' preferred saloon province ofltaly is represented in New York by its restaurant, which serves 51 "to get a few drinks 'on trust."' Like ethnic grocery stores, most saloons as a meeting place for fellow townsmen." Most of these restaurants were failed, usually during economic recessions with high unemployment. extremely simple and undecorated, with sawdust on the floor and dirty For some groups, retailers of food were almost as important as the pur­ windows. 54Restaurants catering to the city's Jews were not much different. veyors of beverages in providing opportunities for sociability. The numer­ Their suppliers reckoned that lunch rooms and restaurants, mainly kosher ous men without women in communities of immigrant sojourners espe­ and catering to the Jewish trade, did about $292 million in annual trade in cially needed prepared meals. Italian, Chinese, and Japanese gang laborers the 1930s.55Still, the Egyptian Rose, a Jewish Aleppan restaurant opened working under a boss or padrone often hired their own cook as they trav­ 'in 1919 by Rose Rissry, seemed to its client like "more than a restaurant · eled to railroad sites or California harvests. Finnish, Albanian, and Greek ... It was a social plaza for the Syrian Jews to play backgammon, have men housed together in cities in cooperative boarding houses, called poi­ Turkish coffee, and talk to each other."56 katalo in Finnish. For Jewish and Italian New Yorkers, the boarding house or restaurant,

More commonly, however, groups of men found meals in boarding like the small grocery, provided an important route for an ambitious immi... houses operated by women, who provided bedding, laundry, and meals for grant to escape wage work. When, for example, Malka Grossinger-re~ a fixed weekly payment-equal to about half of what an entry-level female portedly a brilliant cook, and the daughter of a tavern-keeper-tired of worker earned in a garment factory or cannery. At any given time, be­ working in the garment industry, she opened a restaurant. By working 18 tween one-quarter and one-third of immigrant families kept boarders, al­ hours daily, she and her husband, Selig, soon made a small profit, but after lowing women to operate small businesses from their own homes, based on two years the work broke her husband's health, so the family transferred to their traditional cooking and cleaning skills. A German described the food the country to open a boarding house in the Catskills. he received in 1855 at a German boarding house as soup, vegetables, and As Malka Grossinger eventually would, too, a wide variety of enclave meat at noon and in the morning and evening meat, cheese, and butter. 52 businesses expanded by catering to ethnic and family celebrations. In Women cooked for an average of eight boarders, baking bread and often Trenton, merchants at the annual Italian festa honoring a favored pa­ preparing eight separate meals at eight separate times: one reported cook­ tron saint offered shelled filbert nuts on a string, torrone, anise cookies, ing different meats in one pan, "each with a tag of some sort."53 zeppole, clams on the half shell, and Italian pastries. By the 1930s Italian Rosa Mandavi, who lived in a Minnesota mining town, kept 16 male caterers replaced the women who had provided food for the banquets of boarders by the time she reached age 19. Her day began at 4:30A.M. and ethnic fraternal organizations, for weddings, and for other rites of pas­ ended at 11:30 P.M.; after dinner, she packed lunches for the following day. sage. In Jewish communities, caterers took on the additional function as The largest and most successful boarding houses eventually functioned "ritual specialists," providing food for bar mitzvah celebrations, confirma­ much like hotels. Women rarely operated these, but ethnic ties remained tions, graduations, engagements, sweet-sixteen parties, and the circumci­ strong in defining the clientele. Minneapolis city directories in 1880-1881 sion celebration, the bris. Caterers modeled their food on what people ate listed 60 boarding-house hotels, including a Hibernia House and "The at home, but provided it on a more lavish scale. For Jews in 1940 this 82 • We Are What We Eat Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 83

might mean a meal of a grapefruit half, gefilte fish, mandl (egg drops), half Grossinger did? Familiar with the questioning spirit of rabbinical reason­ a chicken, peas and carrots, kugl, candied sweet potatoes, ice, and apple ing, Selig reminded his critics, "Don't you know . . . that it says in the strudel. 57 Talmud that the six-hour rule doesn't have to be observed if it's a question Catering family celebrations became big business, particularly as immi­ of health? Why do people come here from the city? For their health. And grants attained a modicum of economic security and could enjoy spending why do they have milk in the bam at five o'clock? For their health." With surplus cash on important rituals. In Jacksonville's Greek St. John's Ortho­ their reputation secure, the Grossingers eventually even hired non-Jews, dox Church in the 1930s, all the Greek restaurants in town collaborated to but taught them the laws of kosher. One-a German chef named Fritz cater a huge wedding with 400 guests. The meal was a banquet of cold Vaihinger-boasted that he had become "perhaps the world's leading ex­ roasted lamb, roasted beef, lettuce and tomato salad, celery, stuffed ripe ponent of kosher cookery, an acknowledged authority on all questions of olives, roquefort cheese, sherry, and muscatel. The wedding cake had been Jewish dietary law." purchased from a local bakery.58 In New York, the Irish-run Dublin House Promotionals for Grossinger's resort also consciously linked Jewish tradi- specialized in banquets for ethnic societies and the Knights of Columbus. tions of matchmaking with the resort's continually evolving kosher cui­ Some ethnic societies themselves went into the catering business or oper­ sine. Under their guidance, food not only provided an opportunity for ated restaurants for community celebrations: the Germania Hall had its' sociability but the means to endogamous marriage and reproduction own restaurant in the nineteenth century, as did the Polish National within American Judaism. According to Grossinger's historian, "First they Home in the twentieth. get the young couple to sit together, then they keep bringing additional Kosher-eating Orthodox Jews demanded increasingly sophisticated food foods: first waffles; then Danish pastries hot from the oven. They agreed to service, not only because of their special dietary rules but because of their another cup of coffee and a nibble of pastry. Only who can stop at a nibble increasing economic prosperity. Grossinger's boarding house in the Cats­ of Grossinger's hot Danish pastries?" When a couple became engaged, kills became a successful summer resort hotel by keeping a strictly kosher Grossinger's got an advertising gimmick, and the couple got a free honey­ kitchen. The Grossingers were by no means pioneers in this. Beginning moon at Grossinger's.59 in 1899, Jews had bought about a thousand farms near Ellenville, New Grossinger's provided for community sociability on a grand scale, re­ York, and many ran small-scale boarding houses for the tired, overheated, freshing the connections of food with culture. Locally, saloons, restaurants, yet more prosperous workers of New York-small businessmen in the ci­ and groceries served the same function of cultural preservation. Thus, gar, leather, and garment industries, clothiers, furriers, jewelers, and profes­ when the Yiddish writer Reuben Iceland, a factory worker in New York sionals. and part of a group of younger writers who called themselves Di Yunge, Respecting sabbath laws was difficult in the countryside. Malka Grossin­ sought the company of his peers, they abandoned Sholom's coffee house of ger explained, "Before sundown on Friday it is necessary to cook and store the "elders" on Division Street and began gathering in the basement res­ the bulk of Saturday's food, which can reach huge proportions in a busy taurant of Goodman and Levine's, with its "smell of roast herring and resort. Hence the ice Harry got on Fridays. Hence, water all over the cooked fish, sour borst, fried pancakes, bad coffee, scalded milk." Why did kitchen and the place too crowded to move on the busiest day of the they meet there? "Not because, God forbid, they had such a fondness for week." Despite ceaseless efforts, Grossinger's hotel suffered a temporary dairy dishes, but because it was the center of Di Yunge." When Iceland financial crisis when malicious gossip spread that it was not "really forgot himself, and a family engagement he had planned with his wife and strictly kosher": guests reported drinking milk in the bam fewer than six young child, he was met late at night by the grocer in his building, already hours after eating a "fleishig" meal at noon. Who but an entrepreneur of open for business at 3 A.M., who greeted him with the bad news, "Young the same eating community could have responded as skillfully as Selig man, wasn't it your wife who ran to the police to look for you?"60 Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 85 84 • We Are What We Eat 1

merely altered immigrant women's labors. While immigrant men were Proprietors of groceries and eating establishments could easily develop raising a staple crop for market, immigrant women often became the fam­ reputations as wise men for solving small disputes or introducing new­ ily "breadgivers," responsible (with the help of the youngest children) for comers to local politics. To maintain an hospitable atmosphere and the huge gardens, pig pens, and poultry yards, and for preserving, canning, and clear head wisdom required, saloonkeepers limited their own drinking. drying foods for wintertime consumption. Linda Schelbitzki Pickle found One reported to an oral historian, "As a restaurant man, a saloonkeeper, I evidence in her German-American grandfather's account books that his don't get intoxicated. I don't drink before five o'clock, and then at five only contribution to household food was to purchase four bags of flour a o'clock, I drink maybe three highballs. After that, I don't drink no more."61 year; her Nebraska grandmother "produced everything else that the family This was good business sense, of course, but even more it was a sensible needed."63 To the north, in Minnesota, men sought wages in lumbering strategy for community leadership. and mining, while women and children fed families on marginal farms in a harsh climate and marketed their small surpluses locally. Finnish children recalled mothers who canned for several months of the year-fish, rhubarb Enclave economies fostered a distinctive business culture which com­ sauce, and jam in the spring; blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries in bined profit-making, family labor, high business risks, and communalism. the summer; vegetables as they ripened, especially pickles; wild game and This was neither the guiding culture nor the organizational structure of the meat in the fall. They also sometimes complained of "endless berry pick­ modem food corporations that were evolving simultaneously with enclave ing" and of bounteous but monotonous meals of bread, potatoes, root businesses. In the new food industries, wage-earners replaced family labor, vegetables, milk, butter, and meats. Immigrant women's food processing hierarchy replaced communalism, and bureaucracy replaced personal ties also provided the basis for small businesses. As late as the 1920s, Finnish between owners and employers and between retailers and consumers. In all women traded their excess butter instead of using scarce cash for groceries. these respects, enclave business-while equally motivated by profit-seek­ One family's monthly purchases were limited to coffee, sugar, yeast, spa- ing-seemed out of step with the values and structures of the national food ghetti, graham flour, and baking powder.64 marketplace and its expanding corporations. In the city, too, food businesses linked home and workplace, facilitating Perhaps the most striking feature of enclave businesses was the predomi­ family labor. Grocers set up housekeeping behind their store, so that in nance of family labor at every link in the food chain, from farmers to Mary Antin's Arlington Street, "customers were used to waiting while 65 retailers. German and Central European farmers, for example, brought the storekeeper salted the soup or rescued a loaf from the oven." A Swed­ with them to the United States a long tradition of women and children ish girl growing up in her father's grocery store in the Midwest carried with performing heavy field work, including plowing, haying, and harvesting her into later life vivid memories of wandering back and forth between alongside the men of the family. A German woman like Katharina Wolf kitchen and storefront, where, as the storekeeper's daughter, she sampled Langendorf Tiek of Madison County, Illinois, recognized the hardships many kinds of candies. Her grandmother and her aunt also ran small stores that such traditions of family work imposed on her. In 1869, while plowing in the mining town where she was bom.66The semifictional Umbertina a potato field with an incompletely tamed horse, the horse "knocked me (based on the Italian-American grandmother of novelist Helen Barolini) over and struck me in the back with its hooves and the plow caught in my began selling sandwiches to the men who worked with her husband, then skirt and took me along ... You can imagine what pain I suffered. Four expanded into the grocery trade in an upstate New York community. days later I had a little girl."62 Immigrant women's work in the fields was Experimenting with "vertical expansion," she leased a farm where her interpreted as a shocking rejection of the norms of domesticity that na­ children raised produce for the store. Her much older husband became her tive-hom American women had adopted by the tum of the century. assistant, purchasing at the farmers' market or entertaining customers with The commercialization of farming and food production did not end but 86 • We Are What We Eat Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 87

stories and roasted chestnuts. With the help of her sons, Umbertina be­ assumed control of all business details; Harry drummed up business and came an importer, too.67 developed the idea of the free promotional weekend. Immigrant drinking establishments depended as much on family labor Students of small business observe that family businesses survive be­ as any other business. In Chicago, wives of saloonkeepers worked hard to cause-like the Grossingers-they use unpaid family labor to save and keep bars well stocked with food; they also tended the bar. Laws in Massa­ expand rather than purchasing consumer goods and a higher standard of chusetts and Illinois prevented the hiring of children from outside the living. Even then, many do not prosper, and their survival depends exclu­ family, but saloonkeepers' children generally worked with their parents. In sively on the often back-breaking labor of the family, including women San Antonio Frank Bushick reported that "patrons dropping in" to the and children. Indeed, women like Florence Hoy-who opened a Chinese German bars of the city "would be waited on by a barmaid, possibly the grocery store with her husband in the early 1930s-worked 12-hour days, 'mama,' a large, round-waisted house frau in a comfortable house wrapper, from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M., six and a half days a week with no vacations.70 As knitting or sewing in the family quarters where she could watch the bar Mary Antin's father or Jennie Grossinger's mother might have countered, and attend to the business."68 Native-born Americans were as horrified to however, exploitation within the family allowed men and women alike to find German women working in saloons as they were to find women cus­ avoid the wage dependency, industrial discipline, supervision, and bu­ tomers there. reaucracy of the corporate workplace. Family businesses were a better route Sharply different in their labor regimes from modern corporations, small to autonomy than they were to making a fortune. family businesses nevertheless remained the dominant form of business in Even the bigger and more successful businesses of enclave economies the United States until the 1930s. Two thirds of American retail busi­ depended on communal cooperation among producers and consumers nesses in 1923 were still mom-and-pop stores.69 And family management rather than upon incorporation and bureaucratization. Cooperative rotat­ survived considerable expansion, even in enclave businesses. Nine of An­ ing credit associations in some groups allowed Japanese wage-earners to drew Schoch's eleven children worked together into the 1940s to run their save money, and to become tenant farmers and to open small stores; the father's business. In the case of the Ghirardelli family of San Francisco, one same form of self-help organization gave West Indian immigrants in New son became president of the incorporated family business in 1895, and he York the cash they needed to open small groceries. In German-settled and his siblings owned a majority of company shares. Ghirardelli's grand­ Anaheim and later in the Italian-Swiss Colony of northern California, children continued to run the company-albeit with decreasing effective­ immigrants experimented (unsuccessfully) with cooperative wine-making. ness-in the years after World War II. Across the country in New York, Jewish workers and consumers experi, Grossinger's, too, long remained a family-run enterprise. In its early mented, considerably more successfully, with cooperative bakeries. years daughter Jennie's "rich husband" (her cousin Harry Grossman) pro­ The Jewish Workmen's Circle opened its first cooperative bakery in vided a cash income for the two-generation family by working in the city Paterson, New Jersey, in 1902. Over the next twenty years, six Jewish and while other family members ran the boarding house in the country. In four Italian and Finnish cooperatives opened in the Northeast. The largest 1919 the Grossinger family debated how to use the money they had saved: was the Brownsville bakery opened by two branches of the Workmen's father Selig wanted an automobile, mother Maika thought it sensible to Circle in 1918; it operated its own stores, and in the 1920s had ten trucks use savings to buy truckloads of chickens and gefilte fish. Jennie argued for delivering $400,000 worth of bread. Its success rested on the active partici­ becoming a real hotel, and she got her way. Different responsibilities fell pation of bakers' unions and the absence of conflict in workplaces where to each member: Selig raised much of the hotel's food; Maika ran the workers were also owners.7 1 kitchen, assisted by a deaf son; Jennie became bookkeeper and gradually Grocery (or consumer) cooperatives were even more widespread. Often 88 • We Are What We Eat Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 89

they developed from lineage, kin, hometown, or fraternal associations and the cooperative movement expanded rapidly for the next twenty among immigrant consumers. In Locke, California, Chinese immigrants years. organized a "shares" grocery store and communal gardens, while Italians Politics more business pressure was the main threat to stability in Madera, California, founded a Consumers' Cooperative with its own than newsletter: it welcomed Italians, native-bam Americans, and Mexicans as and growth in the CCE/CCW. Many radical Finns believed their stores members.72 were not essentially business institutions but rather weapons in a working- · Cooperation among food buyers became an especially important alter­ class struggle against capital. Workers on strike, angered by unsympa­ native to private business and family enterprise in the grocery trade of the thetic local storekeepers or faced with a mining town company store, often upper Midwest. Even more than producer cooperatives of butter, cream, united themselves into cooperative buying clubs. By the 1920s about 10 or cheese-which functioned essentially like business partnerships--con­ percent of Finnish cooperators attempted to link their consumer coopera­ sumer cooperatives in this region fostered a genuine critique of corporate tives directly to the Communist Party, transforming them into political and capitalist American food businesses. Immigrant cooperators had Euro­ organizations. Eventually defeated within their local cooperatives, Com­ pean intellectual roots; with few exceptions, their cooperatives followed munist cooperators then withdrew from CCW to form their own, short­ principles first outlined in England's Rochdale Cooperative-open mem­ lived, alliance. After their withdrawal, more non-Finns joined cooperative bership, democratic control, and the return of surplus earnings to consum­ stores, apparently more willing to cooperate once economic interests pre­ ers in proportion to the amount they spent on purchases. These were vailed over left-wing politics. The CCW at that time replaced its red star "cooperative commonwealths" in the marketplace. label-a design featuring a red star and hammer and sickle, which all' Consumer cooperators par excellence were Finnish immigrants in rural peared on coffee and canned goods-with the less controversial, but still glowingly red, "cooperative" label. areas of Minnesota and Michigan, with their many co-op groceries. Their historian concludes that "no other group, immigrant or otherwise, suc­ For almost twenty more years, retail cooperatives performed well as ceeded in establishing such a large number of consumers' cooperatives that businesses and as forms of community activism. In 1919 the CCE had opened a bakery; and eventually a clothing department, coffee roasting have existed over such a long period of time."73 For many Finns, coopera­ plant, feed mill, and cooperative publishing office followed, along with tion was an integral part of working-class struggle. Preceded by Finnish a federation women's guilds and a newspaper for cooperators. Its success experiments with mutual aid insurance companies (a common expression of reflected in part the CCE's one-week course in bookkeeping-introduced of fraternalism in other immigrant communities too) and by cooperative along with a simple system of bookkeeping devised by manager N. V. boarding houses, the main expression of Finnish consumer cooperation was retail distribution. Nurmi.74 V. S. Alanne, head of the education department, also developed a curriculum that taught managers and employees about the principles of In the years between 1904 and 1907 Finnish buying clubs evolved into both business and cooperation. small cooperative grocery stores; by 1913 eleven "Finn stores" operated in According to the archivist who arranged the extensive papers of the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, in both mining towns and isolated CCW, the co-op became the main institution for many rural Finnish rural communities. After the Finnish Socialist Federation and its news­ communities. It was, he reported, "more than merely a retail business that papers spread the word of their success, a boom in cooperative store open­ they considered their own. The cooperative movement represented a way ings occurred in the period 1913-1917. Federation, first proposed in 1914, of life, providing not only for their material, but social and cultural needs became a reality in 1917 with the foundation of the Cooperative Central as well."75 The survival of cooperatives as a form of business thus also Exchange (CCE); it changed its name in 1931 to Cooperative Central required the reproduction of an entire way of life. Training began with Wholesale (CCW). Federated cooperatives survived postwar inflation, managers, who studied cooperative philosophy, beginning with Rochdale, · 90 • We Are What We Eat Ethnic Entrepreneurs • 91

and the history of cooperative movements in Europe and the United Lacking sufficient numbers of personable, and servile, managers like Mr. States. Alanne believed that Americans had made an important addition Thornton, small cooperatives found they could not compete With corpo­ to cooperative philosophy, for in this country, "when they become success­ rate groceries. ful in any particular line of business, and their membership increases, they begin to EXPAND into new lines of goods or services," typically through 6 federation. 7 As late as the 1940s, long after Communist cooperators had When one compares enclave businesses to the rapid growth of modem withdrawn, part of the training course for cooperative managers required food corporations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is them to tackle fundamental economic issues by answering essay questions easy to emphasize their fragility, failures, and backwardness. In a sense, like, "Name the advantages and disadvantages of the capitalistic system." however, enclave businessmen were also ahead of their time: they sought In midwestern towns, it was women who taught cooperative consumer­ to make profits by effectively serving relatively small market niches, long ism to the children and grandchildren of Finns, and to some of their before this became a popular corporate strategy after World War II. En­ non-Finnish neighbors as well. By the 1940s, with an English-speaking clave businessmen serviced market segments that were as Yet unrecog­ second generation coming of age, women's auxiliaries in the Central Co­ nized, and untapped, by bigger businesses. Only Sicilians knew that Sicil­ operative Wholesale developed a wide range of social and educational ians would eat and buy guguzz. In enclave business, it was not money but activities to promote the cooperative philosophy among the newer genera­ cultural capital that underwrote profits, as small, family-based enterprises tion: they sponsored summer camps, fair booths, and Saturday schools and offered their friends and neighbors what large corporations could not. circulated newsletters in order to "broaden and develop understanding of The importance of cultural capital highlights striking differences be­ the cooperative movement as a way of life as well as a way of business."77 tween native-hom African-Americans and immigrants from Europe and Such women believed they were "the bosses' real bosses," since their "buy­ Asia. The African-American entrepreneurs of Charleston's food industries ing dictates what goods shall be handled."78 marketed not to other African-Americans but to their biracial southern Despite efforts to pass along the cooperative way of life, cooperative community. Emancipated slaves did not have eating traditions distinc­ grocery and retail stores fell into decline after World War II. Their de­ tive enough to generate an enclave market where blacks enjoyed special cline reflects the passing of the Finnish immigrant generation, the collapse knowledge.B1 While cooperating as consumers or producers seemed rela­ of their radical labor movement, and the purchase of cars, which made tively unproblematic to Finns or Italians or Japanese, W. E. B. Du Bois's corporate grocery chains accessible to rural consumers. Even convinced advocacy of Negro cooperation in the 1930s struck his colleagues in the cooperators noted that the philosophy of cooperation became increas­ NAACP as a dangerous rejection of their goal of equality through integra­ ingly incompatible with good business practice during this period. A 1953 tion. The NAACP eventually ousted Du Bois for such nationalist radical­ evaluator for the CCW noted that cooperative managers saw their posi­ ism, which seemed to support the separation of blacks from white society, tions as "just a job and not a very good one at that" and that the coopera­ in order to create an enclave economy of their own-much as the Nation tive stores themselves "have only fair to poor (some VERY sad looking) of Islam does today. produce displays."79Fewer and fewer managers matched the cooperative Enclave businesses also regularly revealed the limits of familism and zeal of one Mr. Thornton, whom a visitor from the CCW found to be a cooperation as alternatives to corporate forms of business enterprise. "very pleasing personality." The inspector "enjoyed observing the way he Even in New York's Jewish community, with its long European ghetto­ was serving his customers, carrying groceries into the cars, opening the based tradition of communal organization (kehillah), communal efforts to doors for incoming patrons, etc., it was certainly a pleasure, compared with guarantee the ritual purity of slaughtered meat and poultry repeatedly some of the rude service we get in most of our cooperative societies."Bo foundered. Enclave conflicts were more the product of tensions between 92 • We Are Wltat We Eat CHAPTER FOUR

brother and brother, between family butcher and his suspicious neigh­ bor/consumer, and between family and community interests, than they were a fight-to-the-death between small, anticorporate immigrant busi­ nesses and modem, corporate American food industries. As the case of kosher meat reveals, the sources of failure came from inside ethnic com­ munities-from competing ethnic provisioners, family feuds, and shrewd ethnic consumers, not from the ruthless capitalists of America's industrial­ izing food corporations. Even as enclave businesses flourished and the cultural conservatism of their consumers seemed invincible, savvy but financially insecure ethnic businessmen looked for less volatile markets. They began to deliver the products of the national marketplace to enclave consumers. At the same time, they also learned to lure new customers to cross ethnic boundaries Crossing the Boundaries and purchase dishes of ethnic roots and inspiration different from their own. A second round of multi-ethnic borrowing and blending was soon underway. of Taste

In the 1920s, a Texan concerned that visitors to New York might "run along home with the idea that New York ... is simply a collection of B&G Sandwich Shops [and] Thompson One-Arm Cafeterias" surveyed the fuller culinary scene in his guide to Dining in New York. He recom­ mended Sardi's as "an Italian-American restaurant [that] quietly special­ izes in the three sea-food dishes that made the fame of Prunier's of Paris." He sent visitors uptown to Arnold Reuben's for a pastrami sandwich and downtown to the Lower East Side to Perlman's, where "insolent, lackadai­ sical waiters talk back to you, bawl you out, bang your order down in front of you, bring you tall, blue siphons of seltzer wherewith to wash down the amazing rich food." He recommended Moneta's on Mulberry Street, "ruled over by the watery gray eye of Papa Moneta himself," and also the low­ priced Barbetta's, with its artistic clientele. He suggested a visit to The Bamboo Forest/Young China and the Chili Villa-one operated by Mr. Williams, a former student in China, and the other by a New Englander who supplemented her "hot tamales" with Cape Cod clam chowder on Friday night. A trip to Harlem, he warned, promised danger, along with glimpses of

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